As part of tomorrow’s symposium, the archaeologist and author, Nick Thorpe will discuss the prehistoric use of chalk, not only as a place to leave a mark or a rock to carve into figurines, but also as the material used to create the first British monuments; a form of neolithic land art, existing thousands of years before Smithson. He writes: ‘hundreds of metres across, taking thousands of hours to create. The visual impact of these chalk monuments may have been just as shocking as modern art, permanently scarring the land.’ As ‘performance spaces’ these sites not only manipulated the visual landscape, but also how it was used and how it sounded.
See programme for full details of this talk and the other presentations at the symposium: timesenselandscape.com/programme
chalk: time, sense and landscape 